In 2023 we featured thoughtful reflections that inspire and guide us to a better future.
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Lessons from AMLO’s Success
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Edwin Ackerman authored The Origins of the Mass Party. At Syracuse University, he’s an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a senior researcher in the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean. We excerpted Ackerman’s comment below from his interview with Jacobin’s Nicolas Allen.
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“AMLO has found a way to use anti-corruption discourse to re-legitimize the state and advance a project against neoliberalism. The way that he’s done this is by redefining neoliberalism: neoliberalism wasn’t the contraction of the state, as is normally assumed. Instead, neoliberalism was the instrumentalization of the state in the service of the upper class. Neoliberalism is corruption. It wasn’t the separation of the state and market; it was actually their coming together as part of an elite class project. This holds lessons for the Left at large.”
https://mexicosolidarityproject.org/archives/151/
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Mérida-based muralist, printmaker and painter Juana Alicia is also a teacher. She has created some of her murals in collaboration with students and community in both the California Bay Area and México.
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“The mural form is my favorite. I love the theatricality, the social interaction in a public place, the monumentality, the interface with the environment. Murals make the images accessible to a wide public: to the folks in the streets, at demonstrations, or just going about their lives, struggling, loving, suffering, rejoicing. You’ll be walking down the street, and pow! A building becomes a song, a film on walls, an alternative vision to the commercialism bombarding us from billboards to our telephones.”
https://mexicosolidarityproject.org/archives/115/
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Social Movements: Feminism
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Heather Dashner has been a socialist activist since the 1970s. But she always disagreed with male leaders in the movement, who believed that women's liberation should wait until the working class takes power. Since then, she’s been at the forefront of every struggle for women's equality in México.
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“Under México’s penal code, stealing a cow rated as a more serious crime than raping a woman. And if you terminated a pregnancy, you were committing a crime. We had to decide how much we should ask for, how much progress we could realistically make. After much debate, we agreed that we would avoid the language of criminalization. So later, in 2021, we felt we had won a huge victory when lawmakers finally decriminalized abortion at the federal level.”
https://mexicosolidarityproject.org/archives/119/
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Méxicanos and Chicanos in the US
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Jorge Mujica has been a visible and vocal leader in Chicago’s Mexican community for decades. He’s active in both US and Mexican electoral politics. He ran for US Congress in 2009 and currently serves as an alternate representative in México’s Chamber of Deputies.
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“Chicago is México’s US political capital. While Los Angeles has a larger population, they’re not active the way we are. In 2000, we held our own symbolic Mexican election, even though our votes didn’t count. We set up 42 polling places, and 10,000 people voted. We’ve been doing it ever since. Most Chicago Mexicans identify with the left. In 2018, AMLO got 69% of the vote in México; he got 78% here. The PRI polled at less than 5%. Why? Because for most Mexicans, neoliberal PRI government policies are the reason they had to emigrate.
https://mexicosolidarityproject.org/archives/155/
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Jayson Maurice Porter, a postdoctoral associate at Brown University, studies the intersections of the environment and food systems, science and race throughout México and the Americas.
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“Arsenic came mostly as a byproduct from the smelting of copper and silver, a large-scale enterprise in late 19th century México. American companies imported arsenic into the US to make glass, paints, and insecticides. By the 1930s, US companies were sending arsenic-based pesticides back to México for use on cotton plantations. Arsenic happens to be toxic to humans as well as insects, but the deadly effects of this cumulative poison took a long time to recognize. In both México and the United States, the Mexican and Black workers who dominated the farm labor sector suffered the most from the deadly effects of arsenic and other pesticides.”
https://mexicosolidarityproject.org/archives/120/
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